Things have started to take form!
The zombies are multiplying and are getting more “zombie like” everyday.

Right now, the following features exists:
* The player can throw a rock that makes a noise when it hits the ground.
* The player can sprint and sneak. This affects the sound levels emitted by the players feet on the ground.
* Zombies can see/hear the player.
* Zombies that isn’t in the CHASE state will react to the noise made by a rock thrown by the player.

Features that doesn’t exists yet:
*Zombies communication with each other.

Other then this, I will tweak the AI some more to make it even more realistic.

Finally I got some progress worth sharing!
(The blue line is the RayCheck and the red line is a confirmation that the zombie has found the player e.g there is no wall in between)

The vision of the zombie is almost complete. It can now see the player and act accordingly e.g change state between WANDER, ACTIVE and CHASE.
The CHASE state makes the zombie chase the player while it sees him.
If the zombie loses sight of the player it will enter an ACTIVE state and lose some speed compared to the CHASE state. In this state the zombie will walk in the last known direction of the player.
Finally after some time the zombie will enter the WANDER state and lose even more speed while it walks around aimlessly searching for the player.

So at the moment I am working on getting the zombies eyes to see the player. There are some problems with the raycast that I need to figure out because right now the zombie can see through walls…
Other then that I have been working a bit more on creating functions that for example gives me a random position or a random position in front of the zombie on the navmesh. As well as a function that returns a boolean if the zombie can see the player. This is to create a better wandering behavior.

Currently I am working a little bit all over the place since I now got all the pieces for the AI.
Since I got the navigation mesh working and can make the zombie walk to random points in the world, I can now focus on making the zombie wander in a “natural” way.
So this week and the next has been and will be all about creating the mind of a zombie.

I will start with creating the wandering behavior and after that I will add a more active behavior and a chase behavior.
And since no behavior has been made I am also doing some planing and utility work right now e.g working all over the place…

But I am glad to see the boll rolling! Feels like I am finally getting some where!
I will post a small video when I get something more then one dude following another…
See you later, bye bye!

So, this week will be about understanding and using the navigation mesh and path finding tools for Nebula.
I also want to download the old game project from our second year and use that as a reference for understanding Nebula once again.
Honestly, I don’t remember much from working with Nebula. I was hoping that would not be the case since this might prolong the research stage in my project plan. Hopefully not by much!

“Who died and mad you f**king king of the zombies” – Shaun of the Dead

Hello again and welcome back! Glad to see you are still reading about my project!

So… this has been a weird week!
Completing the first step took longer then I had hoped but at least now I got a small world that I can run around in with the possibility of generating a navigation mesh.

I had some problems setting up all the programs but at least now I got the following:

Completed the configuration of Nebula and started to get more accustomed to using it.

Worked with Maya/Blender for the first time in my life! The results were… Yeah I can’t lie. I made a box. That’t about it… 😛

Created a dummy level (in Maya) and got it to work with Nebula.

Recast is working, so now I have the possibility of generating a navigation mesh on .obj files.

Milestone 2 is tomorrow and I am a bit nervous I must say. I don’t know what they are expecting from us so and I’m not entirely satisfied with my accomplishments this week.
But I guess the only thing I can do is work harder and hope for the best!

“What’s the matter? Never taken a short cut before?” – Shaun of the Dead